I’ve been involved with a book drive to fill the shelves a local charter school that currently has empty shelves (gasp!). Empty shelves in a library has to be one of the most horrifying things I’ve seen this year. We’ve been doing well with the donations, over 400 books and counting. The downside of this is that I have had boxes of books flowing through my hands with so many things I want to read and won’t have time to do before we turn the books over to the school and celebrate the re-opening of their new library.

Anyways, one of the books that I couldn’t put back in the box until I’ve read it: Joseph Bruchac’s . I love this book enough that I will have to purchase a copy I can keep. It has a wonderful blend of Native American folklore with modern mysterious happenings, and school-age struggles particularly with respect to being a minority at a boarding school. Bruchac expertly weaves mystical happenings with practical details, such as preparing for a winter camping trip, to the extent that fact and fiction are welded seamlessly together. After reading this book, and finding out that he had another children’s book in a similar myth-meets-modern vein, I decided that I should read everything he has ever written. (Then I looked him up and found out he’s written over fifty books for children and adults… I think I will skip the “Learning to read” level books, but that doesn’t whittle many titles off the list.)

I realize this is not the kind of detailed review I normally write, but the book has such an air of mystery, that I hesitate to spoil any of it for you. For now, back to feverishly trying to read way too many books in the two weeks before we open the library.